Distinct Cerebellar Responses for Flexing, Extending and Stroking Tasks Using 7 T fMRI

The cerebellum plays a crucial role in the control of hand movements, enabling fine motor skills such as clapping and writing. Neurological diseases can affect the cerebellum, often leading to motor impairment. However, the cerebellar organisation of specific motor and sensory tasks in humans is under-explored in vivo compared to the neocortex, due to a lack of acquisition and analysis methods that effectively portray cerebellar activation in-vivo due to the cerebellum's thin and highly-foliated cortex. In the neocortex, by comparison, response differences between distinct motor and sensory tasks have been reported, implying an extensive sensorimotor organisation. Here, we studied the cerebellar functional responses during three distinct tasks: flexing, extending and stroking of digits 1, 3 and 5 using B1-shimmed 7T functional MRI. We analysed the data in the standard 3D-functional space and the surface space, respecting the dense foliation of the cerebellum. All tasks elicited individual digit responses, engaging the cerebellar cortex in distinct ways: Digit extension yielded larger, more bilateral activation clusters and less distinct progressions of digit representations in comparison to flexing and stroking tasks. The stroking responses were found more medial in the anterior lobe than the flexing and extending clusters. The anterior lobe clusters were larger for the extending and flexing tasks than for the stroking task. These results imply that the cerebellum is engaged differently when tasks with differing sensory/motor components are performed and that these differences exist on a (sub)millimetre scale, akin to the mesoscale organisation in the cerebral cortex.